Switzerland's most recent anti-money laundering head said the alpine nation is ineffectual at combating the scale and variety of criminal money that is flowing into Swiss banks.
Daniel Thelesklaf left his job at the Swiss money laundering office abruptly in July – he is now speaking out about what terms an outdated and inefficient system of spotting and catching criminal money being rinsed through offshore bank accounts in Switzerland, in an interview with Swiss daily «Tages-Anzeiger» (behind paywall, in German).
«The cases around Venezuela show how highly suspicious money makes it way to us, and how our entire toolkit for combating money laundering fails,» Thelesklaf said. He noted that banks are notifying MROS far more frequently, but that the special special crime unit set up in 1998 is understaffed, technologically behind, and politically fraught.
Billions Unprocessed
Conversely, Swiss banks are growing more cautious and notifying MROS more often, but effectively flooding the system by doing so. «There is now a bottleneck at MROS as a result. At the end of last year, more than 6,000 notifications were not processed! This represents several billion Swiss francs worth of allegedly criminal money,» Thelesklaf told the Swiss outlet.
«In terms of technology, we're still in the 19th-century: in all comparable European countries, data are submitted electronically,« Thelesklaf said. In Switzerland, banks often submit data by the box, with account statements, files, and meeting notes – MROS' analysts then have to literally manually enter the data into their system, representing an enormous waste of resources, he noted.
Swiss Treasure Chest
The Swiss native said United Nations-backed software adopted last year is ultimately inadequate to capture the scale of crime. «Switzerland is often the treasure chest at the end of the laundering, in the so-called integration phase,» he noted. «That's why we look at entire business relationships, and not just individual transactions. The software was not built for that.»
A veteran lawyer who served as MROS' first head when it was set up 22 years ago, Thelesklaf is widely-respected internationally among crimefighters. He returned to Bern last autumn, but left after just 11 months due to differences of opinion. He is the second head of the unit to leave the job in less than two years, highlighting an urgent need to reform the system, as finews.com wrote last month.
Little Political Will
Thelesklaf, who is now «chargé de mission» at Monaco's financial intelligence unit, SICCFIN, advocates for identifying patterns in order to prevent laundering. He also wants Swiss officials to work more closely with banks as well as with other international crime units, and for more automation and updated technology at MROS.
Swiss politicians have shown little inclination to tackle reforms, even after a coterie of ugly dirty money scandals including Venezuela's state-controlled oil firm, 1MDB, and FIFA. Despite being the largest graft scandal to hit Switzerland in recent history, PDVSA has barely rippled in the alpine nation.
